How to make people accountable

In our last memo, we explained the importance of high levels of accountability for organizations, countries, and private lives.

The message: Make people accountable, and your organization will perform at much higher levels.

How to do this? What are the key levers?

Apply the following changes in this order:

1. Put the customer in the center of everything you and your organization do. Derive your strategy and all operational plans from the real customer value (yes, sometimes you have to ask your customers!). Repeat this message constantly and go ahead– as a leader, talk to customers at least weekly.
2. Make decisions and reasons for decisions clear and show the results in a simple way. Clear understanding is the first precondition for the confidence which is needed for accountability. Nobody can act with confidence in an uncertain environment.
3. Make people WANT to act because they believe in the need for action, not because somebody tells them to act. An overload of methods and policies plays a very bad role in many organizations. They decrease the levels of accountability to the minimum.

These all are simple ideas and yet I do not see them implemented in the vast majority of organizations. This is good for us as consultants, but bad for you as a leader as long as you do not change these rules of the game.

Leaders and managers are the root causes for issues caused by low levels of accountability in their organizations.

Yet they can be the lighthouse for changing the situation for the better.

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This post is from our Friday noon memo #98. Interested in regular updates? Sign up here.
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